Hesitation
Phenomena in Spontaneous English Speech

Howard Maclay
and Charles Osgood

Abstract

This paper reports an exploratory
investigation of hesitation phenomena in spontaneously spoken English. Following a
brief review of the literature bearing on such phenomena, a quantitative study of filled
and unfilled pauses, repeats, and false starts in the speech of some twelve participants
in a conference is described. Analysis in terms of both individual differences and
linguistic distribution is made, and some psycholinguistic implications are drawn,
particularly as to the nature of encoding units and their relative uncertainty. A
distinction between non-chance statistical dependencies and all-or-nothing dependencies in
linguistic methodology is made.